Oblationem
by wideawakepastmidnight
Summary: SAMCRO's trigger-man finds himself lost in the aftermath of an ordered hit. ONESHOT. [PART 3 of the ON THE ROAD series]


Twenty five minutes.

One thousand five hundred seconds.

One hundred and fifty nictitations of his road-wearied eyes. Six hundred and twenty five inflations of his nicotine imbued lungs. Two thousand, six hundred and twenty five palpitations of his mutilated heart.

That was all it had taken to tear apart a family; to rip an innocent woman from the seat of life. To splinter the very soul of a beloved brother.

Because regardless of the allegations that had been laid at his door, Opie Winston remained a SON; a brother.

The phone call from his President had broken through not two minutes ago. Harry Winston was innocent. At least of the charges of betraying the Reaper. And the man had not been the one driving the beaten-up truck. It had been his pint-sized spitfire of a wife.

Donna Marie Winston now lay with her very essence showered across a pane of glass; three of his bullets lodged in her skull, her cerebrum laying bare for the world to see.

The trigger-man of SAMCRO now was kneeling in the dirt next to his Street Bob with unbidden tears coursing down his weathered cheeks, his pre-pay relinquished on the ground by his knee and his quaking fingers knotted in his corybantic curls.

 _He had simply been following orders_ , he reprimanded himself. _It hadn't been his call_.

Fuck.

He couldn't even convince himself of that shit.

There was no way to deny the discernible truth that he had been out for blood.

A rat was a rat; and the threat of such a being held just as much of a threat - if not more so, for the lack of uncomplicated control.

The Sergeant-at-Arms propelled himself from the loose dirt beneath him, sediments still clinging to the weave of his denim, and launched himself at his motorcycle.

Thrusting his arms into his kutte, he haphazardly discarded his helmet to one side - for the first time in his asphalt-tender career, he no longer saw the use for such protection. He had, after all, been the cause of an eerily similar demise.

Spurring on his well-tuned engine, he released the throttle and barrelled forward through the cover of bushes onto the deserted tarmac before him.

The roaring of the engine beneath him and the howling of the apparent wind that enveloped him did nothing to ease to discontent and discomposure that riddled his body and mind.

The muscles of his gun hand lay convulsing against his bones, the whole structure quivering against the handlebar, as he quickly gained on the farewell sign that marked Charming's borders.

He couldn't remain within the town, the ecosystem that now harboured so much pain and suffering. It would make matters worse for all if he stayed; the guilt and culpability that now burdened his frame would serve only as incentive to confess.

'Just following orders'.

Jesus Christ.

The mere thought left a residue on his tongue; sulphuric and sickening. The remnants simply proof of the demons that had come to rest in his soul.

The fucking Nazis had attempted to claim such things, and his sins were no lesser than theirs.

Perhaps he had not been the source of the annihilation of an entire population; but he too had left orphans in his wake.

He had slaughtered numerous faceless criminals before, massacred entire companies of Club enemies, never once pausing to consider the widows and waifs left trailing in the dust. But this was his debut in murdering innocents. His first infraction when it came to spilling his own family's blood.

Without the guard of his timeworn KD's, his eyes burned as the cool night tore past and, unburdened by the weight of his helmet, his unruly curls whipped around his jawline and cheekbones, causing disturbances in his peripheral vision. His salt-drenched cheeks cracked under the pressure of the air around him, the skin breaking and weeping in imitation of his spirit.

As he breached Interstate 5 headed north, his tyres continued to refuse to hum the lullaby against the asphalt that had soothed him for so many years. The rhythm instead hounded on his conscience, determined to see him suffer.

MUR-der-ER. MUR-der-ER. MUR-der-ER.

He unhinged his jaw as far as his afflicted skin would allow and released the animalistic howl that had been amassing in his chest since the glimpse of the petite body collapsed against the steering wheel that he had caught through the darkened window of the truck.

His grief tore up through his oesophagus, leaving him with the distinct belief that his lungs now lay ruptured in his chest.

He was broken, fractured, mangled; a mere shell of the man that he had been born.

And yet, he couldn't bring himself to find fault with the SONS. No arraignment came to rest on the Club in his mind; the blame was his, and his alone.

He was weak - just as his mother had told him before she slammed the door in his face for the last time. He didn't deserve any of the goodness that had entered his life. The only thing he really knew how to do was fuck everything up.

It was the reason that he had driven his Old Lady away; packed his daughters off with her. He had known from the beginning that she was no role model when it came to mothering, parenting, but the wounds and mental scars that she left their girls with would be loving caresses in comparison to what he knew himself to be capable of.

Fighting the urge to close his eyes, he pulled his motorcycle onto the hard shoulder and hastily dismounted. He threw himself down into the sparse turf that framed the highway and crumpled in on himself, wrapping his arms around his chest in an attempt to prevent himself from imploding.

Gut-wrenching sobs wracked his body as he lay there, his face buried into the ground.

Little Ellie and Kenny would now have to mature without the quiet grace of their mother to guide them. She had, of course, been the leading parental figure within the Winston household. Opie had been behind bars for the majority of his children' lives and since his return, he had been struggling to wend his way back into their affection - even with the active support of his now deceased wife.

As time passed, and what could have been hours crept by, his tormented mind began to morph the faces of the Winston youngsters into those of his daughters, Fawn and Dawn. They too had been all but orphaned by his hand.

Eventually, he found that his tears ran dry and he began to drift into a semi-unconscious state. Even as he harboured the partial desire to cease to exist, his body began to work to restore him - numbing his pain with a natural anaesthesia and slowly shutting parts of him down to recuperate.

Drifting off into the darkness that blanketed the side of the road, he thanked some superior being that he had abandoned his pre-pay back in Charming. There was little doubt in his mind that he could not afford for his brothers to find him in this state.


End file.
